Five Revenges Wrought Against Lara Croft
by Asynca
Summary: A Five Ways Prompt. Five short, unrelated stories of various people seeking their revenge against Lara Croft.


Five Revenges Wrought Against Lara Croft

By Asynca

...because there aren't nearly enough Five Ways prompts in the Tomb Raider Fandom.

* * *

ONE

I was on the way out of my manor when I was accosted in my driveway by a mob of press monkeys and a large offensive-looking television camera.

I revved the engine on my Kawasaki Ninja, which growled like a guard dog at the lot of them. Unfortunately, they weren't the slightest bit intimidated. I wondered how much I'd have to pay as settlement if I ploughed through the whole crowd, Grand Theft Auto-style.

Someone thrust a microphone in my face before I had the opportunity to tell them all to wrack off.

"Lady Croft, what do you have to say about the latest Twitter scandal you've become embroiled in?"

I leaned in towards the microphone dramatically, watching everyone hold their breath, styluses poised to capture my every word. I might as well have _some_ fun with them, if they insisted on bothering me in my home.

"No comment," I announced finally, trying to back my bike out of their midst. "If you want to communicate with me you can do it via my lawyers."

"You seemed pretty keen to get the message out to everyone this morning without your lawyers," someone at the back shouted, breathless.

"I don't have a Twitter account," I called back, finally managing to find a break in the scrum. "Anyone posting with my name has no official association with me. Now clear out of the way, please, I've got errands to run."

"So you've got no comment on your budding relationship with actor Malcolm McDowell?"

_That_ stopped me in my tracks. I certainly had nothing to do with him – what a vile suggestion – but I distinctly recalled Zip commenting a couple of nights before while watching telly that McDowell was the ugliest man in Britain. That had been right before I'd dropped Zip's mobile on the tiles. It had been completely by accident, but Zip had claimed I'd done it on purpose. It was simply a coincidence it had happened straight after he'd taken photos of me spilling the tacos he'd cooked all down my front.

"What do you say in regards to your Internet Service Provider's logs showing clearly that the post was made from your connection here at Croft Manor?" someone else prompted her.

I stared down the barrel of the camera lens pointed at me, reflecting on two things: one, I knew an Internet Service Provider that was going to get an angry letter and a demand for compensation from one Lady. L. Croft & Estate, and two, I knew one naughty techspert that was going to get a boot up the backside for turning off the security software and posing as me on Twitter in the first place.

* * *

TWO

Rubbing her gloved hands furiously together against the cold, Lara decided whoever thought it would be a brilliant idea to start a civilisation in Kazakhstan was absolutely bloody mad. She was wearing all the most advanced thermo-technology money could buy and _still_ parts of her were going numb.

"Watch the track, Lara!" Alister's voice startled her through the headset. Since she hadn't even been about to tread onto it, his concern about her wellbeing seemed a little controlling despite being completely genuine. It reminded her of _Keeping Up Appearances_, with Hyacinth's constant instructions on how to drive_. 'Watch the tree, Dear'_, she heard in her head, and chuckled to herself.

She was approaching the far end of the hall, and the door leading to the next area had been left ajar. That meant that someone had recently used it. Backing slowly up to it, she took a pistol from her holster and cocked it, just in case.

"There's no one there, if you're wondering. We're all actually about to leave."

She stood straight up, immediately recognising the voice speaking through her headset as Amanda.

"You again," Lara noted, not believing her for a second that there was no one in the corridor. Good thing she hadn't, either, as when she rounded the doorway, a bullet skimmed past her head. She dropped and rolled, shooting back in the direction it had come from.

A man groaned, and something heavy hit the floor.

Lara approached the body, nudging it with her foot. "Wishful thinking?" she asked Amanda, referring to Amanda's statement that her men were leaving.

"He must not have got the memo." There was amusement in her voice.

Lara found it odd that this time, both Alister and Zip had nothing to say to her old colleague. Rather than dwell on it, however, she reappropriated a few cartridges of ammunition from the corpse's artillery. They didn't fit in any of the weapons she was carrying, but they might come in handy later.

"Bet you're wondering why it's so peaceful," Amanda drawled. "I had my staff remotely adjust the frequency of your headset." She sounded quite pleased with herself.

"Your staff?" Lara clarified quietly, peering around another corner, gun at the ready.

"Well, you don't think you're the _only_ one of us who has computer nerds working for them, do you? The only difference is," she mused, "mine are Russian and work for peanuts, and yours command a full salary."

Satisfied no one was waiting for her down the next arm of the corridor, Lara rounded the bend. "Mine don't _command_ anything," Lara corrected her. "I offer it to them."

"Always so righteous..." Amanda laughed humourlessly as Lara reached the end of the passage and a locked door. "Not very proprietary of you, but I should have expected as much."

Lara scoffed at the reference to business. She was going to comment that Amanda sounded like another blond megalomaniac she'd once known, but she didn't expect Amanda would have heard of Jacqueline Natla. She changed the subject, instead, experimentally kicking the door to see if it would give. "I assume you didn't just call me for a chat."

"Why not? Apparently women do that all the time."

"Apparently?"

"Well, when's the last time _you_ made a phone call to your friends?" She had a point, so Lara let her continue. "Maybe I want to see what you've been up to, find out how your parents are..."

Lara winced as that reference stung her. Amanda knew Lara's history which meant that she'd done it on purpose. "Get to the point, Amanda," she warned, speaking through her teeth.

"Maybe I want to hear your apology again." There was something in Amanda's voice Lara was unable to discern, a hint of something which made Lara feel panicked.

"Or," Amanda finished, "maybe I just want to distract you from _this_."

With that, hands grabbed Lara from behind, immediately removing her weapons and immobilising her. She struggled, but there must have been several men involved in restraining her because she was completely unable to freely herself.

The locked door in front of Lara slid open, revealing Amanda standing in the middle of the entrance, holding the sword fragment up to the light for Lara to see. Pocketing it, she then removed the headset she'd been wearing, gave it a cursory glance and tossed out of the way as she approached Lara.

"I should have known," Lara hissed, feinting towards Amanda until she was held back.

Amanda didn't even flinch. "Yes, you should have," she easily agreed. "You're usually quite smart. Just turns out I'm smarter." She reached over Lara's head and removed her headset, too, handing it to one of the men. "You won't be needing this anymore."

"Are you going to try and kill me, Amanda?" Lara challenged her.

Amanda laughed indulgently at Lara's vehemence. "Believe me, if I wanted to, there'd be no 'try' about it." Her tone darkened. "I have something much more – shall we say – poetic in mind."

She nodded at the men. "Take her inside."

Lara was then carried by her limbs into the room Amanda had come from.

The room itself was circular in construction like an amphitheatre, slopping down towards the centre and lined with chairs. The feature all the chairs were facing was a raised glass water tank that looked similar to something Lara would expect in to see full of marine creatures and in Seaworld. Except, of course, it was freezing bloody cold and in the middle of an ex-soviet stronghold.

"Do you know what that is, Lara?" Amanda was smiling reverently at the water.

"You plan to teach me to bounce a ball on my nose, then?"

Amanda was unfazed by Lara's sarcasm. "The soviets didn't suffer from any of the stupid misconceptions about war being in any way governed by a code of honour. As such, they were very fond of using the torture of traitors as a form of entertainment."

Lara felt her chest tighten.

"That's a functional timed immersion tank." She held her arms out to it as if she were presenting it to the Home Shopping Network. "Isn't it impressive?"

"Just breath-taking," Lara said ironically.

Amanda glanced back at her, a knowing smile on her face. "Oh, Lara. You have such a way with words." To her men, she ordered, "Hook her up."

Lara was transported to a table beside the tank, and, despite her violent protestations, strapped into what felt to her like a harness. She found it extremely unsettling that there was no gag, no blindfold, no headpiece... and her arms and legs were free. Obviously the audience had been rather intent on squeezing as much entertainment out of the exercise as was possible.

Once Lara was secured, Amanda wandered at a leisurely pace over to the glass wall of the tank, and gestured to someone to activate the power. The pad became illuminated, and lights Lara hadn't noticed in the water tank flickered on. No sooner was the tank lit, Lara felt the harness she was wearing shudder and slowly raise her to a standing position. The toes of her boots just touched the table. Then, she was slowly conveyed through the air to be suspended directly above the tank.

Lara looked apprehensively down at the clear surface of the water – which promised to be no warmer than the air surrounding it – and then back up the harness towards where it was fastened to the conveyer belt. Gripping the wire in one hand, she tried to flip upwards, aiming for one of the hooks. Unfortunately, what had looked like a steel rope attached to either side of her hips was actually two symmetrical poles, and she was unable to do anything more than make the harness sway slightly on its hinges.

"This is going to be very entertaining," Amanda predicted, enjoying Lara's efforts.

Lara looked sharply back down at her. "You _are_ going to try and kill me!" she accused. "I'd never have thought you were this low, Amanda."

"Oh, come, now," Amanda ignored the insult, "you're very resourceful. I'm sure you'll find some way to survive." She made solid eye contact with Lara. "I did."

As Lara's harness descended towards the water, Amanda's voice rang out through the empty amphitheatre. "Give her three minutes to start off with. She does a lot of swimming."

When the water first poured over Lara's boots and into her trousers, the shock of how _bitterly_ cold it was made Lara yelp. She bit down on the sound, determined not to give Amanda the satisfaction of hearing how painful it was. She tried to push the cold to the back of her mind, instead focusing on drawing fast, long, deep breaths to front-load her blood full of oxygen before her head went under.

Just before it did, Lara called out to Amanda. "I thought you said you'd put Bolivia behind you!"

As her head was lowered under the surface of the water, Lara deliberately went limp. There was no point in struggling; it would give Amanda far too much entertainment, and consume valuable oxygen. She could attempt to escape when she was raised above the surface again.

She opened her eyes to discover her face – completely numb with the cold – was level with Amanda's on the other side of the glass. Amanda was wearing a calm, resolute expression.

"I'm the bad guy, now," Lara watched Amanda's lips enunciate, the sound of her voice distorted by the water. "I lied."

* * *

THREE

It seemed a rather odd way to spend my birthday, helping Winston move crates of frozen meat out of the walk-in freezer. Well, I figured birthdays were overrated, anyway. Just another day that I could use to do whatever I liked. If that was helping Winston then that was fine with me, especially as he never normally asked anything of me.

"The one at the very back," he instructed, pointing to a crate buried under a sea of packets of frozen vegetables. "I'm getting too old, I'm afraid."

"Nonsense," I told him sternly. "I'm happy to help."

I'd brushed off the ice and moved the vegetables off the crate, and had been searching about it for a set of good hand-holds when I heard the freezer door slam shut. I needed to prop it open to carry the crate out, anyway, so I straightened and walked over to it, pressing down on the handle and leaning a shoulder against it.

It didn't budge.

Frowning, I tried again. This time, I heard the sound of the external lock twisting.

"Winston...?" I called, having a terrified thought that someone else might have crept into the house while I'd been busy in the freezer.

That wasn't the case, however.

There was a very audible smile in my butler's voice as he spoke through the closed door. "Don't think I don't know that you used to do it on purpose to me when you were a girl." I heard footsteps click across the kitchen floor. "Happy Birthday, Lara. I'll let you out when Zip and I have finished decorating your birthday cake."

With that, I had to laugh.

* * *

FOUR

It was the unmistakable click of a pistol hammer that startled me awake, and before I had time to react, I felt cool steel poking into my cheek.

I took a deep, steadying breath as my vision cleared.

"Don't do anything stupid, Ms. Croft," a throaty, masculine voice instructed me in a very thick French accent. "I wouldn't want to have to be shooting you."

His face was a silhouette against my open bedroom window, and I couldn't make out any real details. There was something familiar about him, though. Maybe I'd crossed swords with him at some point, so to speak?

Very surreptitiously, the hand that had been behind my head under my pillow felt around for the knife I normally kept just under the bed head.

He didn't miss the movement. "Uh, uh, uh," he scolded me, and then held up my knife before tossing it across my floor.

"You," he began, "are going to help me tie yourself together."

"Oh, am I." My blankets were tucked too tightly for me to be able to knee him in the groin. No matter, I'd have to wait until he untucked them to tie me up.

"Yes, you are." One of his hands forced my head to turn to the side where he had placed a pile of something in the corner. Pistol still pressed into my cheek, he then used the same hand to switch on my bedside lamp.

Now cast into light, I was able to see the pile on the floor was a bound, gagged and unconscious body. The body was Winston's.

My breath caught in my throat: this man wasn't bluffing. Before I could react, however, the barrel jabbed me in the cheek. "So, don't you make any mistakes, eh?"

He climbed down from standing over me, pacing slowly towards where Winston had been placed. Pointing the gun at Winston with one hand, he took a roll of duct tape from where he'd left it on my dresser and tossed it to me. I caught it instinctively.

"Tape your ankles together," he ordered. In the light, I could make out a long, bent nose and a well-defined body. I'd have remembered that body if I'd seen it before, I thought, noting each ripping muscle and the washboard under his cotton t-shirt. There was something about him, though...

I must have taken too long, because he fired a shot.

My heart jumped in my chest at the volume of it, and I looked immediately to Winston, but there was only a hole in the wall beside his head.

"Time is of the essence, Ms. Croft."

Watching him closely, I climbed out from under the covers and tried to decide if I could make the distance between my bed and the stranger before he'd have time to fire another shot.

"Do you think I'm joking?" he asked me, watching where I was looking. "This old man is of no value to me. It is no bother for me to kill him. You tie your ankles now, or I will shoot him in the head."

"Alright," I said calmly, trying to pacify him. I ran a nail along the edge of the tape to catch the end, and tore a long strip off. I wondered if I could get away with wrapping it sloppily enough to rip off quickly later. A furtive glance up at him warned me that that wasn't the case.

Once I'd finished, he took a pair of handcuffs off his belt. "You put these on your wrists," he threw them to me. When I went to put my hands behind my back, he stopped me. "No, your front. Hands in your front."

I followed his instructions. "What is it you want," I asked carefully. "Money? Something in my museum?"

He laughed robustly and loudly, as if he'd actually just heard a side-splitting joke. "Money? No, this I have."

I watched him carefully, trying to figure him out.

"Ms. Croft. I want my brother back. Can you give me that?" He shook his pistol at Winston. "Can you go back and not kill him for me? No!"

My lips parted in surprise as I catalogued his attributes: arrogance, French accent, attractive but with a rather large nose. "You're—"

"Dupont, Ms. Croft," he confirmed. "Robert Dupont. You knew my brother, I think."

That was bad news, I realised, bad, bad news. If he was here because he'd lost his brother, then that meant there was nothing I could give him that was likely to reverse that. He was an angry man with nothing to lose.

Perhaps I could try and muddy the waters. "Your brother tried to kill me," I recounted. "He would have, if I hadn't killed him."

"And he invited you to that place, eh? Held the door open for you?" His volume was escalating. "No! No, Ms. Croft! _You_ followed him! He was just doing business!"

I couldn't think of anything I could say to placate him, because it was true. In my ears, my pulse was racing. I glanced down to check to make sure I could still see Winston breathing.

"Ms. Croft," Robert took a long, soulful breath, steeling himself. "You killed him. And for this I am here." After a few moments of silence, during which I tried desperately to try and think of a way to get out of this situation, he spoke again. "You have another friend living here, I think. A black man."

Raising the gun a little from Winston, he fired at least five shots at the wall, maybe six, before lowering the gun and pointing it back at Winston's head.

I stared at him, completely confused, until I heard heavy footsteps running up the hallway. Oh, God, no...

Zip burst into my room, Uzi in hand. "Lara!" he yelled, swinging the gun around toward the intruder, a spray of bullet holes drawing a crooked line in my bedroom wall toward the man.

I barely had a chance to shout, "Zip, no! Stay back!" before Robert switched to aim directly at Zip's head, and pulled the trigger just once.

It wasn't even like a nightmare or a Hollywood movie, it was like a documentary. There was no slow motion, no launching myself up in the air, no chance for any heroics. One minute Zip had been flying through the doorway, then next his limp body was falling against the floor like a puppet with its strings cut.

I couldn't breathe as I stared dumbly at his corpse, watching the pool of blood swell underneath him as he lay motionless in it. It wasn't like when Alister died; he didn't have the chance to say anything at all. He was just alive, and then he was dead.

I recalled something he'd laughingly said to me once. "_I'll be good for you to have a man around the house_," he'd known the futility of the suggestion. _"You know, having someone to protect you and all_."

I felt sick: dizzy, sick and like the three fates were about to cut my own strings.

"I hope you didn't love him," Robert said casually, and then laughed. "Actually, it's better if you did. I loved my brother, too."

I couldn't look at Pierre's brother; my eyes were glued to Zip's body, and a gold chain I'd given him for Christmas peeking out of his blood-stained pyjamas. I didn't know he wore it to bed.

"So. Tonight you will come for a nice drive with me along the beach. Sounds romantic, eh?"

If this was it, then this was it. I heard him approach me from behind, and I even heard the metallic clunk of something colliding with my skull.

After that, I heard nothing.

* * *

FIVE

Lara couldn't sleep.

Well, it wasn't that she _couldn't_ sleep, more that if she valued her sanity, she couldn't let herself. At least not at night, she decided, and at least not for very long. Whatever was haunting her would eventually get sick of her and leave her alone.

It was the second week of abstaining that she started to drift off at the dinner table, while leaning against the wall trying desperately to pay attention to whatever Alister was going on about, and while dangling upside down in the training room.

Eventually she gave in and let herself succumb to her exhaustion.

The 'it' that had been pestering her turned out to be an older woman who was dressed like a Greek aristocrat, hair coifed and fingernails painted. As Lara had just retrieved a couple of valuable artefacts from Greece, there was no mystery about her origins or what her quarrel with Lara was.

"Good Afternoon, Lady Croft," the It told her, perching elegantly on the foot of her bed.

"Is it," Lara said flatly, sitting up in bed. Despite being in a dream world, her room looked surprisingly realistic, mundane and boring. There was nothing out of place at all, except for the woman. "You're being rather deferential, given the circumstances."

She shrugged her delicate shoulders. "I see no reason to be rude."

Lara scoffed. "You've been bothering me all week. Isn't _that_ rather rude?"

The woman looked very pointedly at her as a teacher may have regarded an unruly pupil. "I'd say it's much ruder not to answer your door when someone's knocking at it."

Ignoring her, Lara leant forward, crossing her legs and leaning her elbows on her knees. "Well, let's get down to business, shall we? You want me to return the vases, then?"

The lady laughed with genuine mirth, her voice ringing like a song around Lara's bedroom. "Oh, no!" she finished, dabbing tears away from the corners of her large, gentle eyes. "Oh, no, nothing like that. You're cursed, I'm afraid."

Lara stared at her. There didn't seem to be anything so ruddy funny about it. "I didn't know the Greeks were the cursing sort," she muttered.

The lady recovered from her merriment. "Well, we're not, really. My husband had an African spiritual advisor for a few years," she frowned at the moment. "A bad decision in many ways, really. He had quite the temper."

A thought occurred to Lara. "How did your husband die?"

"He bled to death after a black cat scratched him."

"Right," Lara acknowledged, eyebrows in her hairline. "Well, what is it for me, then. Horrible death? Seven years of bad luck?"

The lady crossed her legs smoothly, brushing some imaginary lint from her gown. "Well, no. Deng let me pick how I'd like to curse my belongings against theft." Lara remained silent, waiting for her to continue. "He said I should pick a punishment that would give me the most pleasure to witness if I were alive and experience if I were dead."

"Being?"

The lady leaned excitedly toward Lara, her face lit with glee. "You have to give me a makeover _every night!_"

Lara jerked awake, drenched in a cold sweat and breathing heavily. Contrary to as per her dream, she wasn't in her bedroom at all, but in the hall, reclined on one of the couches.

Alister was crouched beside her, a hand on her shoulder, looking veritably worried by her distress. "Are you alright, Lara?" he asked leaning back as she sat up and put a hand to her forehead.

"No," Lara said certainly, recalling the events of her dream with growing alarm. "I just had the most horrible, awful nightmare!"


End file.
